


So Abram Rose

by draculard



Series: All the Arts of Hurting [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Torture, Infanticide, Mother-Son Relationship, Poisoning, Starvation, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 11:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20506115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: He's the only one of her children who isn't born cruel.





	So Abram Rose

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title is taken from Wilfred Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young."
> 
> Series title is taken from Wilfred Owen's "A Terre."
> 
> See end notes for the poems in question.

He’s the only one of her children who isn’t born cruel. Still, she’d prefer cruelty to his incessant crying; Joffrey could howl for hours as an infant, but Myrcella was always quiet, and Cersei has gotten so used to the silence that she can’t go back. 

He’s three months old when it happens. He sleeps with her in her bed while Robert is away, tucked beside her in blankets as soft as silk. She falls asleep with his face tucked against her chest, his beautiful, bright hair tickling her neck, her chin. It’s the first time she’s been able to rest in days and as she closes her eyes she thinks how much more beautiful he is than Joffrey, how much more kind.

She wakes an hour later to the smell of shit. It’s coated all over Tommen, who begins to stir just as Cersei does. It’s on the sheets and on her nightdress; it’s on her skin. And it shouldn’t break her, because Tommen is her third child, because this has happened before — but it does. 

She cleans him mechanically. She strips the bed without bothering to call for a servant. And then she places him in his bassinet as he wakes fully and begins to cry.

She sits on the edge of the bed she shares with Robert, naked now, not bothering to dress. She stares at the floor, her eyes aching from lack of sleep.

She stands. She takes a pillow from the bed behind her.

She holds it over Tommen’s face until the crying stops.

* * *

Later, Robert finds her sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. Her knees are pulled up to her chest. The pillow sits loosely in her hands.

She’s still naked.

She doesn’t remember taking the pillow away from Tommen’s face.

* * *

The glass is cool against her palm, the bottle as small as her finger. She rubs the pad of her thumb over the faded paper label until eventually the ink smears, rendering it illegible. Still, she knows exactly what it says. She supposes she’ll never forget.

One drop will calm Tommen’s nerves.

Ten drops will kill him. 

She puts her hand on the back of his head, cradling him against her, feeling the softness of his fine blond hair, inhaling his scent. He leans into her just like he did when he was still a baby — trusting, needy, as comfortable against her as though her body were his own. 

She can feel him crying against her. He’s silent, but his face is wet against her skin, and that gives him away. She’s crying, too, though he doesn’t look up to see it and she’s sure he can’t feel the little drops of water falling into his hair.

She curls her right hand, the one holding the bottle, into a fist so that the knuckles brush against Tommen’s arm. He doesn’t seem to feel it.

_ Ten drops, _ Cersei tells herself. Ten drops as sweet as wine, and then a death that’s quick and painless. He’ll never know he’s dead.

Ten drops.

* * *

“My sweetest child,” Cersei calls him. “My dearest son.”

She thinks she means it, too, even when he has her stripped, her hair shorn off, thrown into a cold stone cell like a prisoner, an animal. A traitor to the crown. 

By then, of course, Tommen is the only child she has left. 

The guards tell her that Tommen has refused to eat. This is something to which Cersei cannot relate; her meals come twice daily, and they are sparse and cold and hard, and still she consumes every morsel as quickly as she can. She tells herself to mete out the biscuit they give her, to eat it slowly, crumb by crumb, if only to stave off the boredom between meals. But she never can. 

It vexes her that Tommen sits in the king’s chamber with everything in the world at his fingertips, yet he refuses to eat.

He’s never refused  _ anything _ before. Since infancy, he has never missed a meal. She remembers all too clearly how he used to howl and rage when Cersei was late to feed him.

And now his mother is locked up and Tommen won’t eat. 

She hopes he sees sense soon, before he starts to waste away. She can’t bear to see him as thin and pale as she is now. 

She’ll do a hunger strike, she decides in the coldest hours of the night, when she can’t sleep for shivering. It’s the only thing that’ll make him start eating again — she won’t eat until he does. It’s a plan so simple and so perfect that she’s surprised it took her so long to think of it.

Tommen is too kind-hearted to allow his mother to starve just so he can continue down an ill-advised path of self-destruction and misery. If nothing else will break his solitude and starvation, this will. He cannot abide the thought of Cersei suffering more than she already is.

* * *

But when morning comes, they bring Cersei another tasteless biscuit and she devours it without thinking. Only when she’s licking the crumbs off her fingers does she remember what she’d vowed to herself the night before.

* * *

She has him burned after the fall. Later, much later, Jaime will ask her if she saw the body broken as it was on the cobblestones below his bedroom window. She’ll say there was ash in the air from the explosion of the Sept, coating Tommen’s skin in a thick, grey layer. She’ll say the blood was blackened from the fire, that he looked like he was sleeping in the ash.

The truth is, what she remembers is very different.

The pillow over his face. Ten drops of nightshade trickling down his throat. A hunger strike broken before it’s begun.

Later, when they’re both half-asleep, she’ll ask Jaime, “How did Tommen die?” and he’ll ignore her, convinced she’s talking in her sleep. He doesn’t answer the question. He never brings it up again.

She has the body burned; when she visits him later at the ruins of the Sept, she cannot tell his dust from the dust of a hundred others scattered amongst the stones. 

Smothered, poisoned, starved — she cannot tell. All evidence of his death is gone. 

**Author's Note:**

> "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" by Wilfred Owen:
> 
> So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,  
And took the fire with him, and a knife.  
And as they sojourned both of them together,  
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,  
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,  
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?  
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,  
and builded parapets and trenches there,  
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.  
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,  
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,  
Neither do anything to him. Behold,  
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;  
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
> 
> But the old man would not so, but slew his son,  
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
> 
> "A Terre" by Wilfred Owen (taken from the third verse):
> 
> Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting,  
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.


End file.
